memory loss


Recently exhibited at the University of Wisconsin in April, *memory loss* is a single-channel film projected onto a large-scale immersive panoramic of translucent panels. *memory loss* depicts the re-mediation of the American landscape in the US National archives through the un-archiving of a series of films the US Department of the Interior produced during the Cold War. Screened throughout Latin American in the 1950's and 1960's, each film provided the visual material for the acculturation of foreign territory - namely Mexico and Colombia - into landscapes of American consumerism and extractive capitalism by US interests. If the cultural memory of US infrastructures unwinds on the reels of National Archives films, however, then this memory decays, alters, and disappears with every subsequent screening, reframing our perception of the American landscape produced in these moving images. The richly produced landscapes of US modernism dissipate into ghostly, poor images, creating new publics, debates, and aesthetics for our currently destabilizing landscapes. Projected as a panoramic, the viewer moves through the image as the image moves, illustrating the powerful potential of the mediation of landscape conceptions to reshape the earth, where landscape and its accompanying technologies of sensing have real ecological implications. The changing climate is not simply implicated in the material shifts to our ecologies, but in our memories and its media.

Over the course of the film installation, Colombian activists Marilyn Machado Mosquera and other members of her community provide oppositional viewpoints through their own narrative gaze, posing a re-appropriation of the American landscape and its memory. Mosquera narrates memories of a river personified as both “mother” and “father,” tying together intergenerational connections to the land and its beings. Here, women are both the bridge and spring (fuente y puente) of life, connecting all entities within the territory.



background


memory loss is an installation project that engages a series of films depicting the interiorization of what is now known as the United States. Produced by the US Department of the Interior during the Cold War, the films were widely screened throughout the Global South as a part of the department’s large-scale infrastructure-building civilian aid missions of the time. These produced an aesthetic and affective sense of US infrastructure projects, haptic embodiments of American consumerism. US-built infrastructures in the Global South became mediated forms of desire, fantasy, and fetish divorced from their ostensible technical function.

Screened abroad, these films were an architectural measure through which the US government precisely imaged the dimensions of not just domestic infrastructures but a planetary aesthetic under which a postwar world would be built and brought into a US centric capitalist fold. These films became architectural forms from which local officials across the Global South imagined and subsequently constructed a radically new future decolonized from Western powers yet fundamentally tied to emerging global consumerism.

Using the original 16mm films stored in the US National Archives and other archival materials alongside contemporary digital film Colombia – a major site of US development aid missions during the Cold War – memory loss tracks American landscapes as infrastructure projects that traveled abroad, crossed borders, and established the settler colonial vision of the US federal government as a planetary rule of extractive capitalism. Today, these mediated infrastructures produce the grounds for and accelerate the material effects of climate change. Across the Global South, from Afghanistan, to Mexico, to Colombia, the narratives, ideologies, and images of capitalist extraction consistently construct the material means for ecological crisis and political unrest - the very mechanics of US settler colonialism. As well as critical, this project is constructive; it re-mediates the original films in tandem with newly shot footage towards a remediation of an American conception of landscape. Rather than focusing on the downstream, socio-ecological effects infrastructure projects have had on Global South territories, lands, and cultures, American Re-mediation directs the camera of its vision towards the core of the American landscape conception. This intervention into our collective understandings of and relationships to nature, ground, and territory poses alternatives to the gaze of the DOI, alternatives which also have the power to frame and form the American landscape. As infrastructures simultaneously crumble upon and exacerbate the chaotic grounds of ecological change, how might the American landscape be reconceived? Is perhaps re-mediation a key to the remediation of our landscapes?

Projected onto a circular translucent panoramic screen, the film recalls the original traveling images of 19th century panoramas, posing its own images as ones that travel and produce a global sensing of US landscape abroad. Tracking our vision across the American landscape today today, a cinematic montage of the hubris and vanity of the US federal resource state emerges. The architecture and infrastructure depicted in the Cold War films become spatial follies, not just of and in the American landscape, but also in the sites and sights of landscapes within its geopolitical orbits, both historical and contemporary. The American landscape can be read in the way the US interior has always ultimately read itself: as a screen that extends itself across the globe and touched down with devastating and lasting consequences across the Global South. Projecting beyond the screens and onto the walls of the gallery, the translucent screens blur the distinction between American interiority and exteriority.

Filming was completed both at the US National Archives and Records Administration in College Park Maryland and in the Cauca Valley in Colombia throughout 2023 and 2024 through generous funding by the Harvard Graduate School of Design Charles Eliot Traveling Prize and the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Field work in Colombia was done in collaboration and assistance by:
  • Arturo Escobar
  • Hilda Henao
  • Marilyn Machado Mosquera
  • Roberto Pombo
  • Claudia Leal
  • Jorge Rodriguez

As a circular space, memory loss hosted the Viewsheds symposium, a series of dialogues between pracitioners in landscape, gardening, film, and architecture from across North America. A series of panels engaged the ways in which the American landscape is being “re-mediated” through various media and practices, from the filmic to the horticultural. Within the gathering space of memory loss, speakers and participants found common methodological and practical grounds - a collective Viewshed - from which the American landscape can be reconfigured under the climate crisis.

Speakers and participants included:
  • Isaac Stein and Maggie Tsang of Dept, Houston
  • Abra Lee from the Historical Oakland Cemetery and Conquer the Soil, Atlanta
  • Brian Davis from the Natural Infrastructure Lab at the University of Virginia
  • Ben Balcom, Milwaukee-based filmmaker
  • Dan Schuchart, dancer and director of Wild Space Dance Company, Milwaukee
  • Mike Gibisser, Milwaukee-based filmmaker
  • Neyran Turan, UC Berkeley
  • Adriana Chavez and Victor Rico of Oficinia de Resilencia Urbana, Mexico City
  • Roberto Ransom Ruiz of Tepetl Paisaje, Mexico City

bio


Andy Lee’s film and academic work engages contemporary conceptions and mediations of the American landscape as a method for the remediation of the earth under the climate crisis. Films, landscapes themselves, become modes of radical planetary action. His research engages a series of films produced by the Department of the Interior during the Cold War and screened throughout the Global South as a part of their large-scale infrastructure-building civilian aid missions during the time. These (e)motion pictures produced an aesthetic and deeply emotional sensing of US infrastructural projects: haptic embodiments of American consumerism. US-built infrastructures in the Global South became forms of desire, fantasy, and fetish. Andy’s current work takes a queer orientation of the cinematic body and explores the films’ instructive potential in the construction of a Cold War planetary aesthetic for our own forms of planetary action today. Lee is the current Fellow in Architectural Activism at the University of Wisconsin and the Charles Eliot Traveling Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. They have recently been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, and presented work on the formation of a global Picturesque at MoMA’s Third Ecology Conference, hosted in Reykjavik by the Icelandic University for the Arts and EAHN, at the School of Athens in a Athens Greece, and at the Technical University of Monterrey in Queretaro, Mexico. They hold a Master of Landscape Architecture and a Master of Urban Planning from the Harvard Graduate school of Design.

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